Mothers-Daughters

Or

CELEBRATING MOTHER- DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS- ‘MUM DESERVES A BILLION MEDALS FOR PUTTING UP WITH MY SHIT!’

 

I was too young to express how I felt. When I first became depressed I would have been 12. That was when my grandparents died, that lead to a lot of hurt. Mum’s last relationship and my dad leaving that was when that all started.

 

My dad moved away when I was three. He moved to Queensland shortly after my mum and he divorced. I met up with him when I was 14 for two weeks and he made me another set of false promises. My dad didn’t die, he just walked away. For me in some ways that is worse because he is out there but he doesn’t seem to care. I hate that man. He is the only person I hate. And that is the main cause of my depression, cause of all the anger and hatred I hold towards him. But I am learning to deal with it.

 

Then Mum’s dad, Papa, died two weeks before I started high school. He was like a dad to me and we had a very close relationship. My grandmother had died 5 months before he died. So that was like when I lost it. I gave up on life. Papa had always been my mentor. He taught me. I thought what was the point: the two people that I loved most in the world beside my Mum were gone.

 

Then going through high school and trying to cope with being a teenager and having that burden on my shoulders and then getting harassed at school not just by the students but by the teachers as well, that all added to the burden of my depression.

 

I was always an extrovert- dressed as a gothic, or a punk or a hippie and everyone else would be in their same old gear. My group could accept it because they knew me. But everybody else would go ‘oh freak…’ this that’. Through high school, as you do, I went through quite a few friendship groups because teenagers they don’t know what friendship is really about: ’you’re my best friend, oh no I don’t like you anymore, no you are my best friend’. I went through that a lot. My best friend put me through it heaps of times but we always ended up back with each other. I think because I went through it so many times, I learned to pick up about the sort of people who do it and the way that they act and the little things – e.g. hints from their body language.

 

 

Then I left school, chucked it in. After Xmas holidays I broke up with my boyfriend and that was it for me. That was when I lost it. And then at the start of this year I re-lost it at a totally different level. But back when I was 13 or 14, I couldn’t tell the counselors or psychiatrists what it was, so they would go- ‘oh well we’ll work on this’ and then I would go ‘ok’ and the next one would go, ‘we’ll work on that part’ and I would go ‘ok’. I was too young to be able to translate all the strong emotions of the depression- the anger, the grief, the frustration, the sadness, the loneliness, even the state of apathy. I was too young to be able to translate that from my brain into words. I didn’t understand. I just wanted to explode.

 

Twelve and thirteen year olds aren’t in touch with themselves. They are kids. They think that they know everything. I thought I knew everything when I was 13. I was a stubborn little bitch: ‘Mum, I am doing this and that’s it’. They think they are in control, they know everything. They don’t know about the power of emotions that can overcome you. I couldn’t understand it. You can’t be helped unless you really really want to help yourself. The only way that anything could have been different at that age would have been if they could have opened up my mind and written down what I was feeling and then I could have said, ‘yea that’s it’. The one thing that was the major turning point for me was realising my own cycle of depression. It is being able to understand what is going on in your head. To grasp even little fragments of it. I had an overactive brain. I couldn’t concentrate on my school work.

 

This year has been about finding myself and healing myself. The first part of the year, I wiped myself out. The middle part of the year I spent trying to understand what I was going through. This later part of the year I am spending trying to get over it and get through it.

 

It started in January this year. I was sixteen. I was really really depressed. I just wouldn’t let Mum in. I wouldn’t talk to her and I ran away from home for three months. I cut Mum off totally. The family I was living with kept trying to get me to talk to Mum and I wouldn’t. Mum would call me and I just yelled at her. I think it was because I couldn’t express what I was feeling at the time.

 

I was angry with Mum but I didn’t know why. I think it was because she couldn’t understand what I was going through. I blamed Mum for what I was going through. I thought she should have protected me. I thought. ‘she’s my Mum she should be able to help me with what I am going through’. But she couldn’t because I wouldn’t open up to her. And I realise that it would be really impossible for her because I am my own person and I have to have my own life experiences.

 

Then I was told that my Mum was coming over (late March) I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to talk to her. But she came and we had a screaming match. I wanted to run again. Then in April I rang up Mum, really really depressed and nearly ready to kill myself. Not knowing where to go or what to do. Living off no money. So I rang her and asked if I could come home. We went out to dinner to talk about it.

 

Me being a teenager, I didn’t like Mum telling me what to do. So we went and had dinner and I said I didn’t want it to be all one way. We had to come up with terms and arrangements together. So we came up with rules, like I had to come home no later than 1.30am and I had to tell Mum where I was.

 

This meant that the curfew was just that little bit later. Mum stepped back a bit. Mum’s rules have always been that she doesn’t mind what I do as long she knows where I am so that if I get into trouble she can come and help me. This time, instead of Mum setting the rules we made them together on equal terms. It was my say as well. So I moved back home.

 

And at that time I was addicted to marijuana. It had got worse when I left home. So the first couple of months when I was at home basically what I was doing all day was sleeping all day and going out all night and smoking and coming home off my face and going to bed. That caused a few arguments.

 

I never want to go back to that place. The reason I was smoking so much was so I could forget about my depression and by stresses. I got to the stage where I couldn’t handle it any more and I just wanted to wipe myself out so I couldn’t think. Because if I didn’t do it all day, every day I’d have thoughts racing through my head. I just wanted to stop it. Self-medicating- really really bad self-medication. Then after a couple of weeks I sat down with Mum and told her what I felt about life and what I told her was that I couldn’t handle the thoughts anymore and I just wanted to die. That broke Mum really, really badly. I could see that I was hurting her. That was the other reason I didn’t open up because Mum has always been so strong for me. Throughout my whole life, it’s always just been the two of us and it is really hard to open up to the only person that has been there for you and say I want to leave you. I want to die. So mum got a referral for a psychiatrist and I started seeing Dr. x. He rocks. He put me on medication. At the same time I was reading Reviving Ophelia. Through that I learned a lot about my relationship with Mum and what I was doing and what Mum was doing and the way we were reacting to every little thing we did. That helped me understand ways I could open up myself to Mum.

 

The author mainly focuses on teenage girls and their relationships with their parents. She says the hardest thing in trying to counsel teenagers today is to understand that it is a totally different world now to when adults today were growing up. The things going on today are a lot bigger. We have a lot bigger problems than when Mum was growing up. We’ve got gang violence, massive drug problems. One of the scariest things for me is that I can go and get drugs more easily than I can buy alcohol because I am under age and that really really scares me.

 

I think it is the whole bigger picture of how kids are these days, what revolves in their world that we don’t even consider. I never realised, till I read the book, how the whole world affects her and how she thinks about things. I realise that all those things are around and I realise things are a lot different. I always say to Elizabeth, I feel sorry for you. You can’t go out and do what we did. I didn’t realise how big and how bad it is.

 

After reading the book Mum changed. Instead of just saying come and talk to me, she waited for me to approach. And instead of instantly judging what I was saying, Mum would sit there and take it in, and not say ‘no that’s bullshit’ like she used to. It is just that Mum couldn’t understand where I was coming from. After she read the book she understood that the way I look at the world and the way she looks at the world are two totally different perceptions. I still see a lot of things wrong with the world. I still hate the world. The only difference to me is now instead of running away from it and killing myself I want to try and change it. Mum was taking me more seriously. Instead of saying, ‘that’s not the way it happens, you know you are only so old you don’t understand how the world works’, she took it in more and thought, ‘these things are really bothering Liz, these are really big issues she is dealing with.’ Once Mum realised this, it opened up communication for us. I felt more able to talk to her.

 

I think it was reading other people’s experiences and that they had actually made it through it. That is why I am doing this now. When Mum gave me the book to read I was still living away from home. She told me she was seeing a counselor and she had been reading this book, and she said it’s really good and she asked me if I would read it. Reading other people’s stories that are just so similar to mine, made me look at myself and what I was going through. A teenage girl who is depressed for one reason or another and bottles it up and can’t communicate and then they find the way they can. Emotionally I was in the worst state I had ever been in my life. It was terrible. It was scary I was ready to give up.

 

Liz and I have always had a fairly reasonable relationship. Seeing her friends and their parents, her and I, we’ve been pretty lucky because we could always talk. With Elizabeth I could always say to her, ‘we need to sit down and talk about this’. I would say my piece, and a day or two later she would say that’s right or I don’t think that is right or whatever, but at least we could talk.

But then the talking broke down and she got herself all worked up because there were underlying problems, things that had happened to us in the past that had a not very nice effect on her.

 

Up until this year I have felt the whole thing was a hopeless case. But at the same time I wasn’t prepared to give up. I just won’t ever give up. It was a time factor. She had to work it out for herself. Of course I tried to contact her because I was worried about her. And in the end people were yelling at me for not trying to ring her and I said, ‘no she has made this decision, she has left home, she has to work it out for herself.’ She wants to be responsible, let her see the consequences of her actions. That was very hard, but you have to.

 

In the beginning I was so distraught I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I had a week off work. The people at work were great. They let me take as much time off work as I needed. I just care about her so much and all I want for her, the bottom line, is for her to have a happy life.

 

I had never understood the greatness, the enormity of how she thinks.

 

The initial step of coming back together was going out to dinner and having that chat. That was the first step. It was me gradually realising that to get through this I did actually need my Mum because she is the person who has always been there for me. She is the strongest person I know because through all the stuff we’ve been through Mum, instead of being able to let it all out, she has just pulled herself together and kept herself strong to keep going for me. Once I realised Mum had this tremendous strength and that she was not going to give up on me, I realised that the only way I could get through it was with her help. That took me a few weeks but I got there.

 

The main reason I came home is that I was so emotionally exhausted I couldn’t look after myself any more. I was like a little baby I needed my Mum there to look after me. I just couldn’t handle it any more.

 

She would break down and I just knew what the state of her mind was at that time. I would get her to come to work and do some things for me. Because I knew what she did was such a strong thing, to drop off all her friends her own age. I really admired her for that. She must have been very lonely.

 

Marijuana has people becoming very moody.

 

I was hanging around a group of people I used to go to school with. We’d meet every single day and smoke but they started doing really stupid stuff like stealing cars and breaking into places, or break into people’s cars to get whatever money they could find. Lucky for me, even though I was still smoking, I still had enough sense to go ‘no’ and walk away. And so two of them ended up living in a squat in St. Kilda speeding off their heads every day and one of them was my best friend’s boyfriend. After a while I had to walk away from the group. I couldn’t watch them do it to themselves anymore. And that is what really really slowed me down. It was walking away from them, stepping back and taking a look at what it was doing to them and realising that is what it was doing to me as well. It was a really a big step – away from it all. It was very hard. Because they were the only friends I had who were actually my own age. All my other friends are between the ages of 19 and 30. So that was a really difficult thing for me to do, to say ‘no I can’t be around you anymore’. I saw one of them the other day for the first time since July. She asked me why I had gone away and I told her, “I can’t put myself in that position. I can’t watch you doing that to yourself”.

 

With over use of marijuana, I was just exhausted. One of the hardest thing I have had to do is to quit smoking.

 

When I first came home I was off my face every night. The way I quit was really hard because my mind was a total haze. I couldn’t think clearly and I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. I decided cause my friends were all out doing stupid things, ‘is this really what I want to be doing with my life. Is this really what I want to be: someone sitting in the corner of the room smoking bongs all day’? I decided that’s not really what I wanted. I didn’t just try to stop smoking because I knew that wasn’t going to happen so I just cut down slowly. I cut down to 20 at first, then some more till it was only 3 or 4. Emotionally it was a really hard thing to do. I hated being straight because I loved being on marijuana so much. I hated it. It was just really bad but I didn’t want to be constantly wasted. Not knowing who I am. Not knowing what I want to do. So the actual process of cutting down was saying to myself, ‘do you want to do this to yourself’. It was really hard because I would go out with my friends and they would say, ‘have more, have more’. That was hard because we would be a group of about four of us and we wouldn’t stop until what we had was gone. They would be sitting there keeping going and I would stop and then they’d say ‘Liz what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you’? I’d say ‘nothing’. And then when they started to do really stupid stuff I would walk away from them and that helped me a lot because I was still smoking quite a bit before they started doing stuff That was really the turning point. Like on certain days certain people would have the money to get the marijuana and so that was how we all kept up our addiction because we would share between the group so when I was out of the group I only had my financial supply to keep me going and that was good- that was a really really good thing. I didn’t have the money. I didn’t have friends saying ‘I’ve scored, let’s do it’.

 

It was me and my money. Then I realised I wanted to buy things. I wanted to buy jeans and I thought ‘why am I wasting all my money’? That is really what it came down to. That is what hit me in the end was how much money I was wasting on weed. It is ridiculous. Every time I go buy it I still think it is ridiculous how much money I go pay for it. Now it is not my addiction. Now I do it because I am out with my friends and I am having fun and I can actually enjoy it again. I have the control back. I used to be totally out of it, now I get all giggly. I enjoy it. That is what it was about for me when I first started smoking in the beginning. That is the feeling I liked. Instead of feeling depressed.

 

I had to do this by myself. I was lonely. I didn’t have friends. They stopped calling cause I told them all they were ‘dickheads’. I would sit at home and it was really hard. Mum saw me just sit there and cry, saying, ‘ I have no friends left’.

 

It really hurt that I was by myself so much. All through high school, although I had been depressed, I had always surrounded myself with people. Because I was always loud and I was the extrovert. Teachers didn’t like me that much. I had a big group of friends and then all of a sudden I had no friends. When I left home I didn’t have any friends. I just had bong buddies. That is all they were. They were just people who I smoked with. They were just bad influences on me and I was a bad influence on them too. The whole group was bad for each other.

 

Being in that lonely place, I don’t want ever to go back there. It hurt. It really did.

 

What helped me bear it was the girl I was living with when I was living at home, she had two little boys. She was my ex stepsister and they were like my nephews and so I would go over there and play with them. I would go over there and play little kid games and I would babysit. All the time I would spend my whole weekend babysitting to give me something to do. That was cool, because doing that now I have a really really strong relationship with my nephews and they are 3 and 4. They kept me going. They were so young and I didn’t want to shatter their lives. They love me so much. I couldn’t put them through such a great loss that I was put through at their age. My dad didn’t die, he just walked away. For me in some ways that is worse because he is out there but he doesn’t seem to care. They have learned they can trust me. I will tell them when they are older what they did for me and how much they mean to me.

 

What I think is most important is definitely family and friends and being there. It is definitely compassion and being able to help people and understand where they are coming from.

 

Ever since I was little I have been affectionate and I’ve loved people. A friend of mine, he’s a heroin addict, I’ve seen him go down that path. Things like that really scare me. I look at him as with a disease, someone who needs help, not a dirty so and so. It is an addiction.

 

Since I have done a leadership course I have learned so much about myself. I am glad I can pass that on to other people, because if more people could look at the world the way I do then the world would be a better place. I have accepted who I am. I can use it to my advantage. Something inside me now knows I am going to get through life. I am going to be happy. Before I thought happiness didn’t exist. It was a figment of someone’s imagination, now I realise it does. I am really close to being truly happy again and I am really glad about that.

 

I look at everything I have been through now and I am really happy that I have been through it. It sucks but I had to go through it and I am glad because I look at other people my age and they walk around with these naïve little bubbles and as soon as they move out of home they are just going to go, ‘oh my gosh’ and go on a downward spiral. But I have been there and done that and now I can move on.

 

The main thing to come out of everything I have been through, is that I do have the strength to be honest with everyone who I meet who I think is a potential friend. I tell them I do have depression and I do have bad days because to be my friend they have to be aware of that and be able to deal with it. I just want to help people get through the hardest part of it all. That is what I really want, to be able to make a difference in someone else’s life. And show them, ‘hey I was where you are now. It can be done. You thought it was impossible but I am living proof that you can make it through’.

 

That is where I was so many years ago.

 

It has taken me until these last couple of months. I still have a lot of trouble trusting people. Sometimes my guards do stay up, but I have gotten a lot better. I realise early on who are the people who will be there and who are just there for the ride and to see what they will get out of me. I don’t bother with those sort of people.That’s a huge learning because It is kind of scary to learn/know so much at such a young age.

 

I now know I am getting over my depression. I still have really bad days or a week here and there. I am angry and mean and I yell at my Mum all week and the after that I am quiet and apologetic.

 

Mum has been such a good support. My Mum deserves a billion medals for putting up with my shit. The best thing that has come out of all I have been through was that when I was 10 years old I turned around to Mum and told her she was my best friend and then when I was 12 , till a couple of months ago, she was my Mum and she was a pain in the arse. But now, once again, I am glad to say that my Mum is my best friend and I know that she has always and will always be there for me. That is the best thing to know. Plus Mum has told me a lot that she actually looks up to me because I am such a strong person. You see Mum used to be a doormat. 

 

Dear Mum,

I don’t think you will ever understand just how much you mean to me. Over the years I have learned a great deal of strengths from you and the most the beautiful things I have learned from you are how to show love, affection, compassion and honesty. I admire you for all that you are and your strong will and courage. You have done so much for me. More than I could ever imagine. Thank you for being there always. Thank you for supporting everything I have done. But most of all thank you for forgiving my mistakes and all the horrible things I have done. I love you more than anything.

Love always,

 

LIZ

 

Dear Jill,

 

Jill I am sorry that the first years of your life could not have been good for you, because I was not really present to you. I certainly wasn’t the happiest person to be around. I was suffering and didn’t know how to get out of it, I never used to say anything. Feelings and emotions. Shutting my mouth. Not starting an argument. I was anxious and the problem just kept going. I wouldn’t talk because I was frightened your father would get mad.

 

I wanted to say ‘crap off’ but I was afraid of being battered, hit, told I was useless and no good. What is going in on in men’s heads when they can’t control you, they use manipulation, and bashing to get their own way? Some men think marriage is the certificate to control women. Husbands seem to change when they get married, they become manipulative and controlling. They think, “you married me, you have to do this”. Like some men can start stopping you from seeing your friends because they don’t like them. But it is okay for them to see whoever they want!

 

What made me sick was going against what I thought was right and just thinking, “I’ll do it this way because it will make him happy. If I dress like this, if I say something nice, if he says he wants a coffee, if he jumps I’ll jump”.

 

Your father knew I was committed to you kids and he used that commitment to get at me. He would say that these kids would never be truly mine and that he would take them away from me. I knew that I would rather kill or be killed than to have my children taken away from me. So I put up with the abuse. I felt compelled to stay with him.

 

It hurts me so much that he got away with this abuse for so long.

 

Seeing your faces, my kids’ faces, every day and your smiles and being able to play and do things with you, kept my hope alive. We had a lot of fun in spite of all the terror. So I would turn myself on for you and turn myself off when there was the violence.

 

It took courage for me to leave your father once and for all. It took courage for me to leave.

 

I finally could see that all the promises he made were never coming back- that he was just manipulating my mind and just pretending to give back. I would always give him another chance, and then another and another. It would hurt when nothing changed. Without those chances how could I know he wouldn’t change? I suppose I always knew he was playing with my mind, but because I wasn’t confident, I thought it might get better. I thought I might be able to change him, to save him. That was a big mistake. I now know you can’t save a person from their badness.

 

But when I left your father I was still vulnerable because I feared living alone. I met Paul and fell in love with his caring side.

 

However, for the first seven years of our relationship I ran my life around him. I would wait for him to come home. He used to hurt me a lot. There were expectations I had of him. I put him on a pedestal. He says to me he didn’t ask me to wait around, but I did. In one way he wanted to be with me. When he wasn’t with me, he didn’t want to know. It was like I was obsessed, addicted with the fantasy of the man who would give me a normal family life. The fantasy kept me going but I learned that this man was not going to help me get it. So I learned – you don’t wait for no man. Women have to be the centre of their lives.

 

By talking with other women I could find out who I am. I am not that hard to live with. If you believe in yourself you don’t have to rely on a man. There’s much more fun to be had when you don’t have to answer to anybody.

 

So now with my boys – I may make the tea or do what is needed but if I want a coffee, I’ll have a coffee and sit there after a hard day’s work. I want to be able to sit there and relax until I am ready.

 

Now I can say what I want to say. For example I said to Paul, “if you are going to discipline the kids we need to talk first. I feel like you are taking over my role. I am their mother. You are not their father”. For seven years I have let him control my children and I feel I have harmed you by allowing this. I feel angry that I didn’t put you kids first. If I had put you first I don’t think I would have let things go on like they did for so long. I feel really bad about this and I am so sorry, Jill. I felt it wasn’t right but I didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t realise I had the strength to stand up for myself. I didn’t know I had the strength. I now realise I have a very wise strength. A lot of women don’t allow themselves to have strength because they believe that if they say anything they won’t be loved - he will belt, he will control. But the reality is that, that is the way we allow ourselves to be controlled! Others win and control when we don’t say anything.

 

You don’t need to pickup up after anyone, Jill. Love yourself because no one will love you as much as you can love yourself.

 

I learned you can’t change a person, you have to change the situation. What helped me was when, for example, I was having panic attacks and I thought I was going to die, I heard these words, “the thoughts aren’t real, they’re only your thoughts and you can change them”. And when I changed my thoughts I changed the situation. Instead of having negative thoughts I decided to have positive thoughts. Because people will always be what they will be and in the end when I walk away from them, I have to be with me. If others aren’t giving me worthy feelings, I give them to myself. I give loyalty and trust to myself. And then it is like I am on holidays and every day is a new day. I can always find a positive in what I want to change. If there is a situation or a person I feel is no good, and not worthy of my friendship, I can think I don’t have to continue seeing them. I have to be myself- it doesn’t matter what other people say as long as I can be myself.

 

And for me to give it has to come from my heart. If I am only giving to make a person happy, I lose out. If I am thinking about how sad that person is, and what they are going through, I lose out. I can’t say or do anything because they have to learn for themselves, I can’t fix it. I have now decided I can’t be running around fixing other people’s problems including my adult children’s – I have to consider my own wishes and desires too.

 

 My mum did everything for my brother – she did everything for him and now he doesn’t know how to look after himself.

 

In the past I would have dropped everything to help my family out just like my Mum. I believed my duty was to serve everyone. Then I would have felt angry inside, and upset. I would have felt used and abused and taken for granted and said to myself, “who are these people doing this to me? Who do they think they are?” Isn’t that crazy thinking? But if I didn’t do it the Guilt would have been strong. The Guilt says – “ you are a woman and a mother and your job is to belt up and do everything immediately”. You feel that if for one minute you want something it is selfish. I used to hear a voice that says, “Mothers aren’t allowed to have dreams”. But Jill, dreams are important and young women and women need to have dreams. Putting myself first is not selfish and I don’t need to feel guilty.

 

I have come to realise that I have to do things for me, to make me happy. This is all I have ever wanted but I have never been able to get in touch with it properly because I was so giving. I used to think “ I need to make them happy, before I can be happy”. This attitude, I can see now, has only created more problems because people around me only take me for granted.

 

 What I have learned is that no one is going to make me happy, only me. But I couldn’t find me because of the fog.

Well, firstly I have been able to develop trust. And I have done this through my friend, who has helped me believe in myself and learn to trust people again. It was connecting with another woman. We had girls talk that wasn’t bitching talk. We looked at how people, including ourselves, recreate the things that happen in our lives. We observed other people creating their own shit. We realised it must be the same for us. We also asked ourselves to get in touch with the bad feelings we had.

Trust opens like a flower, slowly, petal by petal before it is in full bloom. I know that in trust my heart will glow, and I will be happy. Putting myself first enables me to sustain a glowing heart. I know that in trust I will be totally present- mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. I know these are all connected. Before I couldn’t go on anymore physically, because I couldn’t give anymore emotionally and mentally. Before I looked in the mirror and I saw a person but I didn’t know who she was. I wasn’t connected. Before I would always be looking at what I was doing and questioning myself, beating up myself. However, trusting someone else helped me trust myself. I am now accepting myself, liking myself, to the point of loving myself.

I know I still have a long way to go. It feels daunting, but I am actually looking forward to it. Step by step (petal by petal) with trust and feeling. One day I will be glowing and blooming.

 

Secondly, I am learning to be firmer instead of screaming and yelling. I am intending to talk to you kids and tell you how I am feeling. I am also hoping to let you learn from your mistakes instead of protecting you. For example I let you change schools, Jill even though I knew it wouldn’t really help, so that you could see for yourself. I know that no amount of words can make you see what I mean. You have to experience things yourself.

 

I am also realising my own power in connection with being a mother- being your mother. If you have a problem with your brother, I will deal with your brother if you come to me, because I am the Mum. Since I believe this myself I am noticing that you children respond to me- you seem to be listening to me. I am now able to really see you and see how you are behaving for the first time.

 

So, I now have to face the responsibility of making parental decisions. Before if you did something wrong I would tell Pat and he would deal with you by punishment (grounding or restricting your pocket money). He used the fear factor to get you to do things and I know that this was wrong. This went against how I wanted it to be.

Now, I know I want to be able to trust you Jill and the way I can do that is by building our relationship and giving you the attention I haven’t been able to. I need to be there for you emotionally, and physically. I don’t want to just be the Mum who does the cleaning, cooking and shopping.

 

Jill, I prefer to be patient and calm, now, and not fly off the handle. Perhaps you can help me stick to this. I want you to be able to talk to me, so you don’t feel like you are all alone. I would like you to be able to make your own decisions after we discuss it. I don’t want to decide for you. I want to leave it up to you. I love you so much I don’t want you to feel pain and sadness. I don’t want you to be manipulated and controlled.

 

Thirdly, It’s about HONESTY AND TRUTH.. It is about total honesty. I realised that once there is honesty there is no other way. .Every other way seems wrong. Honesty creates a balance in your whole life and you feel safe with it. Before it felt like such a struggle, because I wasn’t being honest, just honest in parts. Now I am feeling honesty from the bottom of my heart….before I was disconnected, now I am connected and living through honesty.